ISRAeLITe eMBASSIeS To ASSyRIA 197 in scholarship 75. The material in Hosea suggests that Isaiah of Jerusalem did not begin the process of formulating a Hebrew prophetic response to newly-transmitted Assyrian claims of empire. There are certain in- dications that Isaiah uses formulations developed by Hosea in response to Assyrian claims of empire 76. If so, he is operating within an intel- lectual and literary tradition of prophetic responses to these claims. In studying the process of transmitting Assyrian claims of empire to Judah’s political elite, we ought not to ignore the probability that after 745, the kingdom of Israel played a role in this transmission. Discussions among kingdoms of the region, including both Israel and Judah, as to how to respond to Assyria’s advances certainly took place by 738 BCe, and probably several years earlier. In these discussions, officials representing the kingdom of Israel would certainly have shared some of their knowledge of Assyrian political ideology and military behaviour with other kingdoms, including Judah. The recognition that Judah’s political elite was aware of Assyrian claims of empire before Judah’s submission to Assyria (which took place between 738 and 734) also solves a chronological challenge in dating these prophecies. As noted above, parts of Isaiah 7, 8, and 19 are intended as direct reactions to the events of the years 738-734. Since they contain practical political advice, it is therefore most reasonable to conclude that certain parts of Isaiah 7–8 and Isaiah 19 were composed in very close proximity to the relevant events, in other words, in or immediately after 734. This creates a chronological challenge, since it is surprising to find such reactions so early in what we often consider to be the period of Judean contact with Assyria. We might formulate this challenge as a question: How quickly could the complex system of Assyrian royal ideology, and the motifs used by Assyrians to express it, have been assimilated by the Judean court and elite (a social group that seems to have included Isaiah), considered, and then re-formulated into the sophisticated verbal attacks on Assyria we find in prophetic literature 77? Both the author 75 Similar questions may be asked about the book of Amos, much of which is also seen as the product of the northern kingdom in the eighth century. 76 one such phrase is the use of rp’ to mean “pardon” in Hos 7,1; 11,3; 14,5, and Isa 6,10; 19,22. This usage, to which Abraham Jacob Berkovitz and I are de- voting a separate study, seems based on Akkadian bulluªu, which means “pardon” in several Assyrian royal inscriptions. 77 While it would not take long for a single author to learn about such claims and to subvert them in new rhetoric, such rhetoric would only be effective if the